Saturday, July 24, 2004

Turning over a new blog

I turned 44 yesterday.  Instead of turning over a new leaf, as some do in mid-life, I thought......why not change my blogskin? That's safe. Getting plastic surgery; nursing AIDS orphans in a third world country;  having that change of life baby and moving to the Pacific Northwest while going to college to become a writer might be a bit too risky. Yes, a blog-skin change is a good start to entering my mid-life crisis. 

Happy Birthday to me and here's to hormonal Armageddon.


Monday, July 19, 2004

  
 How or rather how not to end the willing suspension of disbelief…..
 
“The willing suspension of disbelief is the ability to believe which is born firmly in all children, and which often withers as we are taught that the world of faerie imagination is not true.”
 
I was reading these thoughts from a book on faith and art; they made me think about a conversation with Bronwyn a week ago. She and I had just dropped off her sister for a violin lesson, as we were going to use that time, as the good stewards of it we were, to knock grocery shopping at the big Wal-Mart off our laundry list of tasks for the day. Always the eager grocery assistant, especially when sissy is not around to be the older efficient one, Bronwyn prepared a piece of paper and pen for my dictation of the items needed. She was in a happy- I am- alone-with mommy-and-doing important things-mood and just out of the blue she asked, “Mom, Is Santa Clause real…really you can tell me?”  I must preface her inquiry with the fact that for her entire life up to this point we had facilitated the willing suspension of disbelief in the old guy in the red suit and went to great lengths to keep her well coated in her delusion. But today, she wanted the facts or at least she SEEMED to.
 
I paused for a long time as I tried to decide if I should tell her the facts or let her suspension of disbelief wear out on its own. It was a long and difficult pause. She was asking after all, point blank, for the real answer….obviously the time for bursting balloons and shooting down the “Santa suspension” from the sky was at hand.  

This Christmas, I attempted to convince myself, would be easy, no silly Santa lists, or placing Santa gifts all unwrapped in creative vignettes as if he had done it in his make-believe elf fashion.  And best of all, Jesus wouldn’t have to share his glory with some old myth and commercial symbol perpetuated by this evil, consumer culture while poor children are starving in the Sudan for goodness sakes! Yes, my opportunity had come. We had been in error to ever allow her to believe.  Now was my hour to repent of Santa heresy.   “No, he is not real,” I said.   
 
In the softest little voice, and in a sound of disappointment that seemed to have come from her soul and which I had never heard from her before, she sighed, as she said,”Aw, I wanted him to be real....are you sure?”  I looked at her profile in the rear view mirror. She gazed out the window in deep concentration watching things pass by.  Her little profile looked so sad and her scraggly cotton hair didn’t seem as spunky as it had before when we started the list. She seemed a little wilted.  And suddenly I felt like I did when I was a child and had picked a flower in the moment of selfish desire and grew sad as it prematurely wilted and died. “I’m sure,” I lamented.  
 
We both grew silent and I began an inner dialogue assailing myself for ever making the stupid parenting mistake of letting her believe in something that wasn’t real for all these years. Didn’t I know better? All the experts and well meaning parents had warned me.  Encouraging the Santa thing could cause her to come to a conclusion that Jesus isn’t real one day.  Didn't I know better?  And now, I had basically revealed her parents as untruthful hoax perpetuators deceiving her all these years….”What kind of parent am I?" I railed accusingly; creating cognitive dissonance in the mind of an innocent child "….."Why, it would be better that a millstone had been tied around your…..stop!!! " 
 
And then, I had this wonderful idea. I will fix this sad moment. I will tell her the story of the real St. Nicholas of Patara.  I knew it so well, history and all. I would teach her of his pious anonymous Christian charity to the poor and oppressed. I would draw a picture of real Christmas love because, after all, for God’s sake, children are starving in the Sudan…and nothing perpetuates that suffering more than belief in that evil, consumer idol, Santa Claus with his Michael Moore size belly and extravagant toy giving. As I continued in my verbal spasm, preaching the gospel of the real St. Nick and Baby Jesus, her reflection in the rear view wilted a little more and then she said, “Just tell me the things I need to write down on the list.”
 
Willing suspension of disbelief is like a beautiful flower bed meant to fade in its own time. There is a fence around this display of delicate wonder and there is a sign on the fence that reads: DON’T PICK THE FLOWERS.